A couple of weeks ago, I was shared an interesting thread on X. But what I found even more fascinating was that a significant portion of the replies were AI-generated; not by obvious bot accounts but by accounts belonging to real humans. I suspect their goal was to increase the visibility of their accounts and get more followers. This makes sense on an individual level, but of course disincentivizes everybody from engaging on the platform, as you do not want to waste time speaking with bots. In the long term, those techniques are self-defeating, as the social network would be flooded with bots and become unusable.
Additionally, as those models get better, we'll soon reach a point where it will be impossible to know if a piece of content was written by AI, be it an article or a comment. And because machines can write infinitely faster than humans, we'll have to assume that most content is written by machines.
So where does that leave a personal blog? Why even write if the default assumption is that everything online is fake? I'm still pondering that question, but I can still find a couple of reasons:
- Writing is fun
- Writing can be an opportunity to straighten your thoughts on a subject
- I can tell readers that I don't use AI to write articles (except for spell-check). People who don't know me won't have any reason to trust that statement, but people who do can trust it, and I don't see a reason why they wouldn't continue reading.
Fake text, images, and videos might hurt the biggest social networks, but I believe we are still fundamentally interested in each other. I wonder if personal websites could fit into this new landscape. In any case, for now, I'll continue posting and updating this website. :)
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